I've worked with many CMS and web framework solutions in my time, Wordpress, TypePad, Textpattern, CakePHP, Django to name but a few. And one of the things learnt is that the balance between functionality and complexity is difficult to achieve.

The problem I've often encountered is websites often start of with limited requirements that grow over time. A four page static website might later want content management, then a blog, comment moderation, photo uploads and so on. Pick a too restrictive solution and you'll end up being locked out of later expansion. Choose a complex solution and you risk making updating content a chore. Solutions that support a plug-in architecture, such as Wordpress, elevate some these issues but they require regular maintenance and can be prone to security woes.

In the past I would turn to PHP to fill the gap. A couple of includes here and there often gets the job done but the resulting mess is difficult to maintain. Dedicated web frameworks can help in these situations. Django and CakePHP are ones that spring to mind but again, because they aim to cater to a large audience they often feel bloated with a lot of redundancy for simple sites.

As of now I'm looking at CherryPy and Bottle as lightweight solutions that will abstract the code from design while not being overkill for the simple sites I'm working on. I'll write up my experience with these solutions in a future post.